Sorry, Big Ben, But Traveling This Year Is A Tad Too Risky

I suppose it`s all quite flattering in its own insulting way. The English haven`t been so eager to see Americans on their shore since the beginning of World War II.

Even Maggie Thatcher wants us to come to mother . . . or at least to the mother country. The prime minister told the missing tourists, ``We miss you. We like seeing you. We love your friendliness. We love your warmth. Please come.``

British Airways for its part has a campaign that sounds like a commercial for honest-to-American cold beer. Dropping their reserve, they bleat: ``Go for It America!`` The airline has run a contest for free tickets to Americans only.

If we are being lured, we are also being deplored as if it were 1940 all over again. The same Londoners who complained last year that Americans were swarming through their city like sweaty shoppers in a bargain basement now regard empty hotel rooms as proof that we are disloyal to them in their hour of need.

Today the Brits are criticizing America`s ``vacation isolationism.`` They are pressing for the sort of troops that come equipped with cameras and Reeboks instead of planes and tanks. The director general of the British Tourist Authority almost sounded like Winston Churchill when he chided: ``The aim of our campaign will be to show Americans they cannot just sit in

`Fortress America.` ``

After an uneasy spring crop of terrorism, a huge number of Americans simply erased Europe from their map of possibilities. Overseas trips this summer are expected to be down 20 percent, and the $3.3 billion Americans spent in Britain last summer may be halved. Europeans have responded to this with wounded pocketbooks, wounded pride and wounding name-calling.

In endless articles and letters to the editors of one journal or another, Americans have been chided as wimps and chickens. The Economist labeled our disease ``Europhobia.`` Last year, they remind us, 28 million Americans went abroad and only 162 of them were killed or injured in terrorist incidents. In the same year, Scotland Yard notes that 1,384 people were murdered in New York. And the British ambassador in Washington adds, ``I believe that several thousand choked to death in the United States.`` My word.

As an urban American, I understand the resentment people feel toward outsiders who regard your neighborhood--the one you walk the dog in every day --as too dangerous to visit. I also understand the European impression that once again the war (this time the war against terrorism) is taking place on their turf while we hit-and-run, hiding behind our Atlantic shores.

But canceling a hotel reservation is not exactly the same as finking out on an alliance. As tourists from the United States, we are not required to stand tall for America beside the Eiffel Tower, nor do we have to make a political statement out of a plane ticket.

Americans who work 50 weeks a year have no obligation to devote their two weeks of vacation to NATO, waving the American flag or American Express checks around Europe. Nor do they have to spend them overcoming a phobia by paying for a plush hotel in London.

I have in my possession two seats on a TWA flight to France in the fall. This hardly entitles me to a red badge of courage. I am personally more frightened by the prospect of a near-miss at O`Hare than terrorism at Charles de Gaulle Airport. But I refuse to regard my more anxious countrymen as cowards.

A woman wrote to the Times of London, ``I wonder how we can help our American friends remind themselves that any life lived entirely in accordance with seeking safety, comfort, convenience and protection would not be worth living. . . .`` Let me assure her that Americans already know a great deal about life`s risks. But those who seek risks on vacation generally choose the Himalayas over Heathrow.

Tourists are not agents of American foreign policy. Traveling is not an updated ``Bundles for Britain`` program that guarantees Americans all wrapped up in nice fresh green money and ready for airlifting. A vacation is a vacation is a vacation . . . preferably from stress.